Mainnet

Recommended Hardware Specifications

AWS:

m5a.xlarge or any equivalent instance type

Bare Metal:

16GB RAM
4 vCPUs
At least 300 GB of storage - make sure it's extendable

Run a Transaction Node

Transaction nodes are used to read transaction history or send transactions on the Palm network without performing validator duties.

To ensure that your node can successfully join the Palm network, you must specify the correct bootnodes for the environment you are targeting. This allows your node to find existing nodes on the network. Connecting to existing nodes is important as it allows your node to download the chain history and send transactions to validator nodes.

Prerequisites

Hyperledger Besu installed
curl(or similar web sevice client)

Github Repository: https://github.com/hyperledger/besu Docs: https://besu.hyperledger.org/en/stable/HowTo/Get-Started/Installation-Options/Install-Binaries/

The steps we've taken in deploying our palm mainnet nodes are as follows:

Create the node directory Create the directory in which to store the required files and data directory:

mkdir palm-node
cd palm-node

Download the genesis file The genesis file specifies the network-wide settings and defines the first block in the chain. Each Palm environment uses a different genesis file.

The following curl commands download the genesis file for the mainnet environment.

curl -O https://genesis-files.palm.io/prd/genesis.json

Create the Besu configuration file

The configuration file is a TOML file used to specify the Besu options. Alternatively, specify the options directly when starting Besu.

The following configuration file examples include the bootnode addresse for mainnet environments. So we've created a TOML file named config.toml with the following options:

# Palm Mainnet genesis file
genesis-file="genesis.json"

# Network bootnodes
bootnodes=["enode://9cccbaae702d477c5fd4d704a2d6f92a90005f62de980b11b0d042877bf759774cf7d68d358c59427622e87538bc46afa1195d6ac12cb153d6771461c1830d1b@54.243.108.56:30303","enode://d6518f4f318a172158cf73c3e615c4eb488efb14c20b4a2f13570bf01092573222cd6935599a80017512457fb7f229cf6562f9d038b5d0dc98db95074d4a98b3@18.235.247.31:30303"]

# Data directory
data-path="<PATH>/palm-node"

#Enable the JSON-RPCs
rpc-http-enabled=true

Start Besu and specify the configuration file together with the flags you need. This is the way we've started Besu:

besu --config-file=/path/to/config.toml --sync-mode=FULL --random-peer-priority-enabled=true --rpc-http-enabled=true --rpc-http-api=ETH,NET,WEB3,ADMIN,IBFT,TXPOOL,DEBUG,TRACE --rpc-ws-api=ETH,NET,WEB3,ADMIN,IBFT,TXPOOL,DEBUG,TRACE --rpc-ws-enabled --rpc-http-host=0.0.0.0 --rpc-ws-host=0.0.0.0 --host-allowlist=* --metrics-enabled --metrics-host=0.0.0.0 --rpc-http-cors-origins=* --rpc-http-max-active-connections=10000 --rpc-ws-max-active-connections=10000 --max-peers=100

After this, the node attempts to connect to the bootnodes and other transaction nodes, and begins synchronization once enough peers are found.

Confirm the network is running Once the network is synchronized, start another terminal and use curl to call the JSON-RPC API net_peerCount method to check for connected peers:

curl -X POST --data '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"net_peerCount","params":[], "id":1}' localhost:8545

The result displays the validators on the Palm network.

Monitoring Guidelines

In order to maintain a healthy node that passes the Integrity Protocol's checks, you should have a monitoring system in place. Blockchain nodes usually offer metrics regarding the node's behaviour and health - a popular way to offer these metrics is Prometheus-like metrics. The most popular monitoring stack, which is also open source, consists of:

Prometheus - scrapes and stores metrics as time series data (blockchain nodes cand send the metrics to it);
Grafana - allows querying, visualization and alerting based on metrics (can use Prometheus as a data source);
Alertmanager - handles alerting (can use Prometheus metrics as data for creating alerts);
Node Exporter - exposes hardware and kernel-related metrics (can send the metrics to Prometheus).

We will assume that Prometheus/Grafana/Alertmanager are already installed (we will provide a detailed guide of how to set up monitoring and alerting with the Prometheus + Grafana stack at a later time; for now, if you do not have the stack already installed, please follow this official basic guide here).

We recommend installing the Node Exporter utilitary since it offers valuable information regarding CPU, RAM & storage. This way, you will be able to monitor possible hardware bottlenecks, or to check if your node is underutilized - you could use these valuable insights to take decisions regarding scaling up/down the allocated hardware resources.

Below, you can find a script that installs Node Exporter as a systemd service.

#!/bin/bash

# set the latest version
VERSION=1.3.1

# download and untar the binary
wget https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/releases/download/v${VERSION}/node_exporter-${VERSION}.linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar xvf node_exporter-*.tar.gz
sudo cp ./node_exporter-${VERSION}.linux-amd64/node_exporter /usr/local/bin/

# create system user
sudo useradd --no-create-home --shell /usr/sbin/nologin node_exporter

# change ownership of node exporter binary
sudo chown node_exporter:node_exporter /usr/local/bin/node_exporter

# remove temporary files
rm -rf ./node_exporter*

# create systemd service file
cat > /etc/systemd/system/node_exporter.service <<EOF
[Unit]
Description=Node Exporter
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target
[Service]
User=node_exporter
Group=node_exporter
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/node_exporter
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF

# enable the node exporter service and start it
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable node_exporter.service
sudo systemctl start node_exporter.service

As a reminder, Node Exporter uses port 9100 by default, so be sure to expose this port to the machine which holds the Prometheus server. The same should be done for the metrics port(s) of the blockchain node (in this case, we should expose port 9545 - for monitoring the palm node).

Having installed Node Exporter and having already exposed the node's metrics, these should be added as targets under the scrape_configs section in your Prometheus configuration file (i.e. /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml), before reloading the new config (either by restarting or reloading the config - please check the official documentation). This should look similar to this:

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'palm-node'
    scrape_interval: 10s
    metrics_path: /metrics
    static_configs:
      - targets:
        - '<NODE0_IP>:9545'
        - '<NODE1_IP>:9545' # you can add any number of nodes as targets
  - job_name: 'palm-node-exporter'
    scrape_interval: 10s
    metrics_path: /metrics
    static_configs:
      - targets:
        - '<NODE0_IP>:9100'
        - '<NODE1_IP>:9100' # you can add any number of nodes as targets

In the configuration file above, please replace:

<NODE0_IP> - node 0's IP
<NODE1_IP> - node 1's IP (you can add any number of nodes as targets)
...
<NODEN_IP> - node N's IP (you can add any number of nodes as targets)

That being said, the most important metrics that should be checked are:

node_cpu_seconds_total - CPU metrics exposed by Node Exporter - for monitoring purposes, you could use the following expression:
- 100 - (avg by (instance) (rate(node_cpu_seconds_total{job="palm-node-exporter",mode="idle"}[5m])) * 100), which means the average percentage of CPU usage over the last 5 minutes;
node_memory_MemTotal_bytes/node_memory_MemAvailable_bytes - RAM metrics exposed by Node Exporter - for monitoring purposes, you could use the following expression:
- (node_memory_MemTotal_bytes{job="palm-node-exporter"} - node_memory_MemAvailable_bytes{job="palm-node-exporter"}) / 1073741824, which means the amount of RAM (in GB) used, excluding cache/buffers;
node_network_receive_bytes_total - network traffic metrics exposed by Node Exporter - for monitoring purposes, you could use the following expression:
- rate(node_network_receive_bytes_total{job="palm-node-exporter"}[1m]), which means the average network traffic received, per second, over the last minute (in bytes);
node_filesystem_avail_bytes - FS metrics exposed by Node Exporter - for monitoring purposes, you could use the following expression:
- node_filesystem_avail_bytes{job="palm-node-exporter",device="<DEVICE>"} / 1073741824, which means the filesystem space available to non-root users (in GB) for a certain device <DEVICE> (i.e. /dev/sda or wherever the blockchain data is stored) - this can be used to get an alert whenever the available space left is below a certain threshold (please be careful how you choose this threshold: if you have storage that can easily be increased - for example, EBS storage from AWS, you can set a lower threshold, but if you run your node on a bare metal machine which is not easily upgradable, you should set a higher treshold just to be sure you are able to find a solution before it fills up);
up - Prometheus automatically generated metrics - for monitoring purposes, you could use the following expressions:
- up{job="palm-node"}, which has 2 possible values: 1, if the node is up, or 0, if the node is down - this can be used to get an alert whenever the node goes down (i.e. it can be triggered at each restart of the node);
ethereum_blockchain_height - metrics exposed by the palm node - for monitoring purposes, you could use the following expressions:
- increase(ethereum_blockchain_height{job="palm-node"}[1m]), which means how many blocks palm has been producing in the last 1 minute - this can be used to get an alert whenever the node has fallen behind by comparing with a certain threshold (you should start worrying if the difference is greater than 2-3 for the last 5 minutes);
besu_peers_connected_total - metrics exposed by the palm node - for monitoring purposes, you could use the following expressions:
- rate(besu_peers_connected_total{job="palm-node"}[5m]), which means the number of peers connected to the node on the palm side - this can be used to get an alert whenever there are less peers than a certain threshold for a certain period of time (i.e. less than 3 peers for 5 minutes);

You can use the above metrics to create both Grafana dashboards and Alertmanager alerts.

info

Please make sure to also check the Official Documentation and the Github Repository posted above in order to make sure you are keeping your node up to date.

Mainnet

Recommended Hardware Specifications​

Run a Transaction Node​

Prerequisites​

Monitoring Guidelines​

Recommended Hardware Specifications

Run a Transaction Node

Prerequisites

Monitoring Guidelines